America. The change of the venue is considerable, and the difference between the Gothic cathedral and the native wigwam, the Spanish cavalier and the painted man of the scalp, the palace and the prairie, loses none of its distinctness in the labours of the retired tale-writer. He now occupies himself with simpler tasks than the offspring of his own brains, and acts as accoucheur to the teeming memories of the half-smugglers and halfbanditti who supply the Indians with brandy and the Europeans with beaver; the graceful representatives of civilisation in the land of the buffalo.

He

Yet truth has always some kind of nature;-Nature is worth describing, however natural she may be; and we are miserably sick of the softest of romances. Irving's last performance in his present line of business is "The Adventures of Captain Bonneville,” a rambler through the Back Country, on a trapping scheme. The gallant Captain's employment, however, not being, as in the southern parts of the land of liberty, to trap men, but wolves, foxes, beavers, rats, and, we presume, every thing that wears a skin. The Captain's adventures lead him into the heart of the mountain chain which divides the waters of the west from those of the United States. hunts, shoots, and roves at will through this vast region of rock, precipice, and forest, which some future Helvetic will transform into some future Switzerland, and which will form the key of invasion a hundred years hence for the hosts of the prairie land, coming under the conduct of Occidental Napoleons, to strike the last dollar from the desks of the New Englander, and teach the Carolinian that the cato'-nine-tails is not made for the dingyskinned alone. But this work talks of more than mountains. It gives us some insight into the native race which range those mountains, and whom the march of mind, in the shape of American squatters, is hourly driving from their lands; and the march of freedom, in the shape of peach brandy, is as rapidly driving out of existence. The Indians have expressive names for their tribes; some of them lofty and sonorous; some of them sounding meanly to our ears; but all given with reference to personal or national qualities. The tribes whose titles astoundVOL. XLII. NO. CCLXI.

ed our early youth the Chictaws, Mohawks, Chickasaws, and other truculent gatherings of consonants, are names which seem to have departed from every thing but Mr Fenimore Cooper's very voluminous volumes. He is worthy to be their extinguisher; and their epitaph can come from no more mortal hand. But two powerful tribes survive beyond the mountains, who, though they love brandy well, and are infested with the squatter, yet contrive to keep the legislators, negotiators, agents, and ambassadors at a determined distance, and would hang an American senator with no more compunction than if he were not more than man. The horse has done this for them. By stealing the horse from the Mexican Spaniards, the Indians make a cavalry that at once evades pursuit, when they are within the range of the rifle, and takes desperate vengeance when the rifleman, drunk and tired, dozes in the wilderness. The desert riders-and they ride as well as any Arab on earth-come in troops of fifty or a hundred, charge into the heart of the little camp, scalp the men, carry off the women, remount their cavalry with the horses, and are off a hundred miles before daylight has tipped a single pinnacle of the mountain range with saffron. The Crows and Blackfeet are the leading tribes.

Among the Indians are some extraordinary characters. Aropooish, the old chief of the Crows, would have made a great statesman in Europe if he had not been too honest a man for the general exigencies of the character. He was politic enough to recommend the peculiar avoidance of all quarrels with the whites. "If," said he, "we keep friends with them, we have nothing to fear from the Blackfeet, and can rule from the mountains." Aropooish was a master of all the arts of Indian government. He was a great" medicine man," medicine being the established name for the mysterious combination of character which, in Europe, more accustomed to the division of labour, is separated into the priest, the physician, the prophet, and the conjuror. Like Mahomet and his pigeon, and Napoleon and his star, this Numa of the desert had his oracle in the shape of a tame eagle, which brought to his ear the secrets of fate.

E

When

the whites laughed at this, the old chief joined them in the laugh; but the eagle was indispensable among the red men.

But Aropooish was capable of higher things, though in his own quaint style. Mr Campbell, one of the leading traders, distrustful of Indian honour, had deposited a considerable quantity of furs in a caché, or place of concealment. The rest of his furs he had placed under the care of the chief. One evening the old Indian returned to his lodge with a cloudy brow, and sat for a while, according to the manner of his countrymen when engaged in matters of peculiar interest, without uttering a syllable. At length he said to Campbell, "You have more furs with you than you brought into the lodge."-Campbell knew the folly, or perhaps hazard, of equivocating with an Indian, and told him that he had, and where. "You speak straight," said Aropooish; "but your caché has been robbed. Go and reckon how many skins they have taken from it."Campbell searched, and found that he had lost about 150 beaver skins.

The chief now summoned the village. He reproached his people for robbing a stranger who had trusted them, ordered them to bring back the skins, and declared, that "as the stranger was under his roof, he would neither eat nor drink until every skin was found." In a little time some of the skins made their appearance, the bringers quietly laying them down in the lodge, and departing as quietly as they came. Thus passed the first day; Aropooish sitting in a corner of the lodge, wrapped in his robe, and tasting nothing. At nightfall, he asked whether all the skins had come in.

Above a hundred had been returned, and Campbell expressed himself satisfied. But the old chief's honour was not to be so satisfied. He neither ate nor drank all that night. In the morning some more skins were brought in by twos and threes, till but a few were wanting to complete the number. Campbell, anxious to put an end to the old man's fasting, again and again declared that he had got all that was necessary. "How many are still wanting?" asked Aropooish. On being told the number, he whispered to some of the men round him, who disappeared; and, soon after, skins to the requisite

It

amount were laid on the floor. was evident that they were not the stolen skins, but had been collected through the village. "Is all right now?" asked the Indian. "All is right," replied Campbell. "Good!" said Aropooish. Now, bring me meat and drink."

Their parting was equally characteristic." When you come again among the Crows," said the chief, "do not hide your goods. Trust them, and they will not rob you. Put your goods in the lodge of a chief, and they are safe; but hide them in a caché, and any one will steal them. My people have now given up your goods for my sake; but there are some foolish young men in the village who may be troublesome. Pack your horses and begone."

But Aropooish was more than a chief: he was either a geographer or a wit, or more probably both. To some enquiry relative to the country, he replied at full length, and with a patriotic contempt for every other."The Crow country," said he, "is a good country. The Great Spirit has put it exactly in the right place. While you are in it you fare well. Whichever way you go out of it, you fare worse. If to the south, great barren plains the water warm and bad-fever and ague. If to the north, cold winters, long and bitterno grass. You cannot keep horses there; you must travel with dogs. What is a country without horses? On the Columbia, people poor and dirty-eat fish.

Their teeth are worn

out; they are always taking fish. bones out of their mouths. Poor food fish! To the east, live in villages; live well, but drink muddy water out of the Missouri-bad. A Crow's dog would not drink such water. About the forks of the Missouri, fine country; good water, good grass; plenty of buffalo. In summer it is almost as good as the Crow country. But in winter it is cold; grass gone; no saltweed for horses. The Crow country," continued the patriot panegyrist, "is exactly in the right place. Snowy mountains and sunny plains; all kinds of climates; good things in all. When summer is in the prairies, mountains cool; there grass fresh; clear water tumbling from the snow-banks. There you hunt elk, deer, antelope, while their skins are fit for dressing. Plen

ty of white bear and mountain sheep. In autumn, when the horses are fat from the mountain feed, you go into the plains; hunt buffalo; trap beaver. In winter, camp in woods along the river sides; there buffalo for yourselves, and cotton-wood bark for your horses; or in the Wood river valley there salt-weed enough. Crow country exactly in the right place. Every thing good is to be found there. No country like Crow country!"

The panegyric is curious, not mere. ly from the ardour of the chief, but from its giving an enumeration of the actual employments and enjoyments of the Indian's life--a career to which nothing similar exists at present in the world, and of which a few generations to come will possess nothing but the memory. The Tartar roams a wilderness, but has neither forests nor prairies. He feeds sheep, and drinks mare's milk; but he does not hunt. The South American Indian lives on roots and fish. The man of North America is the only habitual hunter.

One of the Plymouth papers mentions an affair which would justify a heavy punishment. Some military gentlemen, as they are said to be by the partial journalist, laid a wager at a drinking-bout that one of their servants would eat three fowls, and swallow a bottle of whisky for a meal. The result was as unfortunate as the performance was disgusting, and as the temptation to the poor glutton was criminal. The meal was swallowed, but it soon produced great suffering. Medical aid was called in, but it proved useless; the stomach pump failed, and the wretched man expired.

As we have no means of ascertain. ing the facts in this instance, we give the statement, of course, on the credit of the journal; but if it be true, we can conceive few offences more fitting objects of enquiry. If two drunken peasants fight in an alehouse, and one dies in consequence, the coroner's inquest brings in "manslaughter" at the least. If two prize-fighters maim each other, and one of them dies, not only the survivor, but the whole party, the bottle-holders, managers, and in.stigators of the fight come under the hand of the law. Undoubtedly, if, at the instigation of half-a-dozen fools, or brutes, in a tavern, however they may

wear the King's cloth, a human life is taken away, the instigators ought to be punished. The death is their work, without whose intervention it clearly would not have happened. But the subject is of a wider description. Wagers of the same kind are not infrequent; and those disgusting exploits tarnish the name of England. They often destroy the existence of a fellow-creature at the time; and common sense, as well as common law, would bring in the whole parties concerned as accessaries before the fact. This proceeding would soon extinguish those abominable wagers.

Another vile custom does infinite discredit to the magistracy of the provinces. It is that of selling wives. A woman, of whom her brute of a husband wants to get rid, takes her into the market on some fair-day with a rope round her neck-sets her up to be bid for by the surrounding clowns, and the bargain is completed for halfa-crown or five shillings. To foreigners this proceeding naturally enough seems monstrous; and they scoff at our affectation of morality. The truth is, that this practice exists but among the most profligate of the lower classes; that it does not constitute a divorce; and that it is directly punishable by law; the object of the whole shameless ceremony being merely an acknowledgment that the husband surrenders all idea, or right, of taking an action against the man who lives with the separated wife. But this practice, at once illegal and disgusting, is a reproach to the magistracy, wherever it is suffered.

If the country magistracy overlook one offensive practice, the metropolitan magistracy, and those of the chief cities, are still more reprehensible. To them all gaming-houses subsist as notorious as the noonday. Yet the magistrates look on, and leave the prosecution to the parishes. Thus the nuisance of private waste is aggravated by the nuisance of public expenditure. The subtlety of the gaminghouse keeper is assisted by the subtlety of the lawyer, and as the result, those actions are generally foiled. Yet a few constables sent in once aweek to seize on the tables, and a policeman stationed at the door to prevent ingress, would, in a short time, abate an evil which has brought more young men to ruin, and more old ones to the gallows, than any known evi

of society. But then the whole proceeding ought to be impartial. Justice, unless even-handed, is no justice at all. The same activity which fastens on the apprentices in Whitechapel, or the bankers' clerks in the Regent's Quadrant, ought to display itself among the stately structures of St James's Square. The Pall-Mall clubs ought to pay their quota of penalty to the public morals, and great lords and rich commoners should be taught the necessity of respect for the laws, by feeling the grasp of those laws.

Another offence, and one of a more offensive, because of a more glaring description, is the state of the lobbies in the theatres. We shall not degrade our columns by attempting the detail of scenes which we shrink from witnessing. But we are entitled to ask, by what right a constable is empowered to arrest a wretched wanderer through the midnight streets, when this pampered and painted profligacy is suffered to display itself in its most glaring and insolent obtrusion in the theatres. One circle of the boxes, though but one, is undoubtedly kept clear of this nui

sance.

If this can be so effectually done, why not keep all equally clear? Do the magistrates disregard the insult to public decency? Do they forget that, by this disregard, they actually assist in violating a public trust for, by the existence of this nuisance, the public are largely excluded from the theatre. Their places are taken up by a class with whom they cannot associate; and even the interests of managers in every theatre in London are eventually injured. For, in a pecuniary point of view, theatres have never thriven as they did of old, since they have suffered this obnoxious class to be prominent among their audiences. The reason is plain the resident families of the metropolis now seldom go to the theatres. Once, they went regularly. Some often, others at stated intervals throughout the year. At Christmas and Easter the custom of visiting the two principal theatres en masse was customary among the majority of the London householders. But this, though children are still taken to see the pantomimes, has remarkably fallen away, and the theatre is no longer among the regular places of the London family's gratification. The result is the falling off of revenue.

:

Nor do we demand the remedy of

this evil from managers: they are too severely pressed by circumstances to be enabled to attempt it; they are too powerless to effect what would now be regarded, not merely as an innovation, but an injury. Riots would probably be the result; and the theatres might be burned down in a rash attempt to restore their morality. The change must come from a higher source. The magistracy must be excited to diligence. The Minister for the Home Department must do his duty; and the metropolis of moral England must not nightly exhibit a dozen displays which would not be tolerated in profligate Paris or gross Vienna.

This reform is the more required from the number of the minor theatres. This number was the offspring of popular outcry; and no stronger exemplification of the folly of that outcry ever was offered. It was alleged that the multiplication of small theatres would at once improve the drama, by opening a more extensive field, improve the actors by competition, improve the public taste by the new patronage of genius, and improve the morals of their vicinities by providing rational amusement for the multitude who would otherwise seek it in the gin-shop. The actual consequences have been directly the reverse. The drama has wholly died; the great theatres being so drained by the minors, that they are absolutely unable to offer the due encouragement; and the minor theatres performing nothing but translations, or the plunder of the principal theatres. Acting is as close upon the point of death as possible; a single good actor being considered as the full appointment for a minor theatre. The companies of the principal being thus drained of their best performers, and these performers being totally lost in the vulgarity and dulness of the companies round them. The improvement of the popular taste is to be founded on the lowest buffooneries of the lowest minors, and "Life in London," and "Jim Crow," inevitably superseding Shakspeare and Sheridan. The improvement in morals is to be ascertained only from the inordinate increase of every species of vileness in their neighbourhoods; every minor theatre becoming rapidly the nucleus of a centre of haunts, themselves the haunts of every abomination.